So, my wonderful girlfriend comes to the Airport to pick me up, and we start heading home. I’m pretty jetlagged at this point, but I’m keeping up the conversation as best I can.

So, she gets me home, and I go up to the main level of the house. I hear the TV, but my roommate’s car isn’t there, so I go in to investigate… only to find my brother-in-law hanging out. This is a surprise, so I ask him what he’s doing.

He says ‘Hiding’.

After probing a little into this, and getting nowhere, I go up to my room to dump off my luggage. One thing to realize is that my room is pretty much a perpetual disaster area. This isn’t helped by the fact that my roommate, in a mad spate of turbo cleaning has DUMPED EVERYTHING AROUND THE HOUSE IN MY ROOM!!!! THE DAY I LEAVE FOR ROME!!!  GAH!
I’m not really happy about this. He apologises later, and everything’s cool, but still. My room was (before I left) far worse than it normally is (and that’s saying something).

So I come up to see a clean floor, and a completely re-arranged room. My sister and brother-in-law have cleaned my room for me while I was gone. As a birthday gift.

Do I have great family or what?

So, after taking off the heavy pack, and handing around my travel gifts to them, I come downstairs to see a different color in my bathroom.

Another story: My bathroom on the main level was horrible. The best description of the wall paper I ever heard is “80′s shower curtain”. But now it’s an orange color (this will send Erin and Angela and Sandra into a fit… they say it’s somewhere between a chartruse and a cinnimon color. Brandon and Josh will understand).

My family (and girlfriend) have sanded off wallpaper, repainted everything, put in a new toilet, new light fixtures, and a new faucet, and even painted the cabinet in my bathroom.

Dang. My family rocks.

Sandy (of Christo’s fame) can’t decide who the bigger chump is… me, for having my family do this, or my family, for being willing to do it.

I say in my defence that I never asked them to do it… it was just a very thoughtful gift.

I’ll post some pictures soon.